Yes! She stood in the middle of the room weeping. Save Clara, and
possibly once or twice Maggie, he had never seen a woman cry--that is,
in circumstances of intimacy; he had seen women crying in the street,
and the spectacle usually pained him. On occasion he had very nearly
made Maggie cry, and had felt exceedingly uncomfortable. But now, as he
looked at the wet eyes and the shaken bosom of Hilda Cannon, he was
aware of acute joy. Exquisite moment! Damn her! He could have taken
her and beaten her in his sudden passion--a passion not of revenge, not
of punishment! He could have made her scream with the pain that his
love would inflict.
She tried to speak, and failed, in a storm of sobs. He had left the
door open. Half blind with tears she dashed to the door and shut it,
and then turned and fronted him, with her hands hovering near her face.
"I can't let you do it!" she murmured imploringly, plaintively, and yet
with that still obstinate bitterness in her broken voice.
"Then who is to do it?" he demanded, less bitterly than she had spoken,
nevertheless not softly. "Who is to keep you if I don't? Have you got
any other friends who'll stand by you?"
"I've got the Orgreaves," she answered.
"And do you think it would be better for the Orgreaves to keep you, or
for me?" As she made no response, he continued: "Anybody else besides
the Orgreaves?"
"No," she muttered sulkily. "I'm not the sort of woman that makes a lot
of friends. I expect people don't like me, as a rule."
"You're the sort of woman that behaves like a blooming infant!" he said.
"Supposing I don't help you? What then, I keep asking you? How shall
you get money? You can only borrow it--and there's nobody but Janet,
and she'd have to ask her father for it. Of course, if you'd sooner
borrow from Osmond Orgreave than from me--"
"I don't want to borrow from any one," she protested.
"Then you want to starve! And you want your boy to starve--or else to
live on charity! Why don't you look facts in the face? You'll have to
look them in the face sooner or later, and the sooner the better. You
think you're doing a fine thing by sitting tight and bearing it, and
saying nothing, and keeping it all a secret, until you get pitched into
the street! Let me tell you you aren't."
------------------------------------------------------------------------